TV was the most popular way to consume news and information during the summer’s UK general election, Ofcom has found.

This is despite another finding by the telecoms regulator that, away from the election period specifically, online is now as popular as television as a way for Britons to get their news.

Among Ofcom’s 8,000 respondents, who were surveyed in four waves of 2,000 across the general election campaign period (23 May to 4 July), 49% reported using television to follow election news this summer.

That compared against 26% who used social media, 24% who said they used news apps, 24% who used radio, 19% newspaper websites, 17% news sites not associated with newspapers and 16% word of mouth.

A large majority of people, 87%, reported using at least one source to follow news and information about the general election.

Terrestrial television scored highest for trust, accuracy and usefulness among respondents, with 52%, 53% and 57% of those surveyed rating TV positively on each of those criteria respectively.

Social media did much worse, with 7% of people describing it as trustworthy, 6% accurate and 30% useful. This was similar to the responses for news received via word of mouth, which 7% of people said was trustworthy, 5% accurate and 21% useful.

Newspapers (both in print and online) were described as trustworthy by 28% of people – higher than other online news sources, which scored 17%.

Election news avoidance: Working class, older people and women most likely to switch off from coverage

In another finding Ofcom said that working class people, older people and women were among the groups most likely to switch off from the news during this summer’s UK general election.

Each group reported having less interest in news and current affairs during the 2024 campaign compared with their general level of interest in news.

Across all 8,000 respondents, people reported similar levels of interest during the election as during a non-campaign period. Asked to rate their interest in news and current affairs from one to five, with one being “not at all interested” and five “very interested”, 48% said they were interested in news and current affairs during the campaign and 50% said they were interested “in general”.

In contrast, 21% of all respondents said they were not interested in news and current affairs in general, and 28% reported not being interested specifically during the election.

Among C2DE respondents (those who work in, for example, skilled or unskilled manual occupations) 28% reported being not interested in news and current affairs generally – a proportion that rose to 36% during the election.

Among those aged 50 and up, similarly, 19% reported being uninterested in news generally versus 30% during the election. Among women those figures were 23% and 32%, respectively.

Ofcom said that the most common reasons cited for a lack of interest was that people “felt like nothing will change”, which was cited by 51% of those who reported being uninterested, and that “it brings their mood down” (44%).

In a related finding, 49% of Ofcom’s respondents said they felt that “people like me” do not have a voice in society.

“The perception of not having a voice increased with age,” Ofcom said, “and people from C2DE households were also more likely than average to feel this way.”

Younger people became more interested in news during UK general election

Young people were the most likely age demographic to report increased interest during the election period, with 39% of respondents aged 18-24 saying they were interested in news generally and 58% saying they were interested during the general election specifically.

Conservatives and Reform UK supporters were the most likely voters to report being uninterested in news during the election. Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green voters reported being more interested in the news during the election than they were in general.

Whereas 45% of people said they felt well informed about news and current affairs generally, 43% of people said they felt well informed about the news during the election specifically. Another 11% said they were “not at all” informed about the election, greater than the 7% who said they were not at all informed about news generally.

A little under half of respondents, 46%, agreed with the statement “it is important to engage with lots of different news sources” compared with 22% who agreed with the statement that it is instead “better to stick to one news source that you trust”. Ofcom said the latter view was more popular among C2DE households.

Ofcom also asked respondents about misinformation, finding 46% of adults were “confident” they could spot misinformation in the media – but 21% thought they could identify a deepfake.

Six in ten people said they had seen claims they thought may have been false or misleading at least once in the prior week, which Ofcom said “included one in ten who said they saw such information several times a day”. A comparatively small proportion, 27%, said they had encountered a deepfake in the prior week.

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Within days of the UK election campaign starting, videos started circulating on a number of platforms ‘investigating’ Rishi Sunak’s ‘real heritage’ following similar patterns to that experienced by Barak Obama during his US presidential campaign.

In today’s digital society, the demarcation between truth and falsehood is increasingly obscured. Misinformation, or the unintentional spread of false information, has become the genericised term. It is, in fact, one pillar in a triad of information disorder.

Peer deeper beyond the viral, baseless claims, and you may spot ‘disinformation’, the deliberate creation and dissemination of falsehoods, a sinister tactic used to sway public opinion or tarnish reputations.

Then there’s malinformation, the strategic use of true information to inflict harm, such as leaking genuine but private information to discredit an individual or entity.

It’s crucial to get to grips with these nuances to identify and avoid information disorder, know the source of the information, understand the context and terms of reference and not readily accept anything at face value.

Information disorder boosted by tech revolution

Information disorder is nothing new but technological advancements, particularly in social media and AI, have revolutionised the way information is created, shared and consumed.

On the other side of this technological revolution, algorithms designed to engage users often inadvertently prioritise sensational or divisive content, regardless of its veracity.

A fertile ground for the spread of misinformation has been created by the ability of everyone to publish, algorithmic bias and the human tendency to engage with content that resonates with pre-existing beliefs.

Information is not always intelligent

The role of AI has introduced new complexities to the information landscape. The ability of AI to create convincing yet false content, from deepfakes in audio, imagery and even video, to fabricated news articles, poses a formidable challenge to discerning truth from fiction.

These technologies, while remarkable when used for good, offer tools for those intent on manipulating public opinion. This underscores the need for a vigilant and informed populace.

Within the first week of the UK election campaign, there were many videos, beyond those of parody or satire, making factually incorrect assertions around ‘National Service’ and an unfounded claim about Starmer’s involvement in not prosecuting Jimmy Savile.

Information runs deep

A 2023 report by Home Security Heroes exposed the chilling ease of manipulating reality with deepfakes, AI-generated fabrications that exploit our trust in visuals.

Beyond the technical prowess, it’s the psychological manipulation that’s concerning. We inherently trust familiar faces and voices, making us susceptible to deepfakes’ potent mix of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.

The consequences are far-reaching, impacting individual reputations, public opinion, and even societal stability. High-profile targets like Taylor Swift (whose deepfake nudes were widely circulated) highlight the potential for mass deception. Social media’s quick takedown in this case underscores the urgency for a comprehensive response. Arguably, only Swift’s stardom resulted in such rapid, universal action. We need education, regulation, and advanced detection to safeguard online discourse.

[Read more: ITN sounds alarm over fake online content featuring Robert Peston, Mary Nightingale and others]

Deepfakes aren’t the only threat. ‘Shallowfakes’, created with traditional editing techniques, exploit similar vulnerabilities. These can be malicious, but often stem from misinformation, like taking quotes out of context or memes masquerading as news headlines.

In recent days, there have been videos using a combination of shallowfake and AI-generated voiceover around supposed hustings where a Conservative MP’s speech has been layered to imply the audience in the background are not interested and sceptical of the orator. Both scenes are totally different but have been merged into one misleading piece of video.

Information creators need to be responsible

In previous roles in current affairs and journalism I have worked with great people who scientifically process the many examples of misinformation. I’ve seen first-hand the relative ease to which they can disseminate. It brings life to the old proverb that ‘a lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on’.

So how can we mitigate the impact of misinformation? Education plays a pivotal role. Enhancing media literacy is not just about people being able to distinguish true and false information but cultivating a critical mindset that questions and analyses the source, context, and purpose of the information they’re consuming.

But journalists and content creators play a crucial role in this ecosystem. Adhering to rigorous verification processes, beyond a fact-check, to delve into the context and framing of information to ensure it is accurate and unbiased, promoting transparency and accountability along the way.

Technology firms, too, bear a significant responsibility. Implementing more transparent algorithms, enhancing fact-checking mechanisms, and fostering collaborations with fact-checkers and academia can contribute to a more informed and discerning public.

It’s vital to support creators and publishers with the skills they desperately need to be able to accurately interpret, inspect and investigate the information at hand in order to inform their response and, ultimately, their output.

Information sharing is built on trust

In an age where misinformation thrives, the cornerstone of countering this tide is rebuilding public trust. The Edelman Trust Barometer offers insightful revelations. Their last report indicates that trust across institutions varies significantly, shaping public receptivity to information.

[Trust in media: UK drops to last place in Edelman survey of 28 nations]

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) charts public trust in media across the complex landscape. It reveals trust in traditional media remains relatively robust, but we are only as worthy as our last headline, citation, video edit or social post.

Engendering trust isn’t an overnight task but a sustained effort. Media institutions have established trust over decades. However, it takes seconds to eradicate. Media brands need to continue to uphold honest, wholesome, ethical, values. That is by no means a rallying cry to return to notebook and quill.

Content creation in 2024 is exciting, it is innovative, it fuels so much aspiration to inspire and bring joy to audiences, made possible by the same technological advances that threaten it.

Paul Doyle has over 20 years of experience in the media industry, specialising in video production and content strategy. At Immediate, Paul oversees the strategic direction of video output, managing content creation, production, engagement, distribution, and monetisation for platform brands. Immediate’s portfolio includes Good Food, Radio Times and BBC Gardeners’ World.

Previously at Tiktok EU, he led content strategy and development, localising content for five European markets. Prior to this, Paul managed technical and production responsibilities at media companies including the BBC, Sky, and RTE and ITV while also launching various formats for broadcast and digital platforms.

In his role as head of programme delivery at First Draft, Paul addressed digital misinformation across three continents through strategic initiatives, promoting digital content integrity for media companies, tech firms, NGOs, and non-profits.

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Comment-based current affairs website Unherd has found itself boycotted by many online advertisers after publishing three articles seen as containing “anti-trans narratives”.

It has been placed on the Dynamic Exclusion List operated by UK-based non-profit company the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) which provides data for online advertisers about websites it considers to be unsafe for brands to appear on.

Unherd chief executive and editor-in-chief Freddie Sayers is concerned that the GDI previously received UK government funding. And he wants advertisers, who pay for GDI data, to stop using a service which he sees as a threat to freedom of expression.

GDI meanwhile sees its work as a counter-balance to the spread of toxic misinformation online which has been fuelled by programmatic advertising and algorithm-driven content discovery on social media and search.

Sayers said the low rating from GDI means his site can only achieve between 2% and 6% of what it could expect to earn through advertising if it had been given a brand-safe rating.

Unherd says it has no political affiliation but its position challenging what it describes as “lazy consensus” and orthodoxies means much of its content is more likely to appeal to those with right-of-centre ‘anti-woke’ views. It was founded by Sir Paul Marshall who is also a major investor in GB News and one of several bidders vying to buy The Daily Telegraph.

Unherd charges £4.99 to subscribers for full access and attracts more than three million visitors per month according to Similarweb. Sayers said if it had been relying on advertising for revenue the actions of GDI would have pushed it out of business. As it is, with the GDI rating in place he said it can only attract low-quality advertising from less scrupulous brands.

GDI uses a combination of machine learning and human raters to identify sites which quality advertisers would want to avoid.

Under its own rules GDI targets “highly adversarial” content about at-risk groups, science and democracy which it believes could cause harm. Such information must, it says, “have the intent to mislead”.

GDI’s ratings are sold to companies which push out advertising programmatically across thousands of websites to enable brands to exercise some control over where their marketing messages appear.

Why has Global Disinformation Index blacklisted Unherd?

Unherd’s Sayers said he approached three advertising agencies and they all reported that the site was only achieving a tiny proportion of what was expected via programmatic advertising.

Eventually, advertising agency Teads revealed that Unherd was being flagged as disinformation by advertising software company Oracle which uses data from GDI.

Teads shared a message from GDI about Unherd which said: “Here are a few examples of the anti-trans narratives listed below. The site authors have also been called out for being anti-trans. Kathleen Stock, the author of the second article is acknowledged as a ‘prominent gender-critical’ feminist. She has opposed transgender self-identification in regards to proposed reforms in the 2004 UK Gender Recognition Act.”

Last week Stock received a “high commendation” at the News Media Association‘s Press Awards in the category of tabloid columnist of the year for her writing for Unherd, losing out to the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday’s Sarah Vine.

The Unherd articles flagged by GDI were as follows:

• An article by transgender anti-self-identification campaigner Debbie Hayton, headlined: “Trans people don’t lack rights. They have been taking and women have been yielding. That cannot go on”
• A Kathleen Stock article which argued it is “fiction” to suggest that people can change their sex
• And an article by Julie Bindel headlined The Transsexual Empire which described sex-change surgery as “bodily mutilation” and claimed it undermines women.

Sayers has given evidence to the House of Lords about what he sees as the threat to free expression presented by GDI and wrote about the issue on Unherd.

A video in which Sayers said the GDI “censors political speech” has been viewed more than seven million times on X (formerly Twitter) after being shared by Elon Musk, who said the body should be “shut down, with recriminations for the miscreants”.

Here is the full length video report into the mysterious ‘Global Disinformation Index’ and how it censors political speech across Europe and the US. Please share widely, more people need to know. pic.twitter.com/vz2cz36q2v

— Freddie Sayers (@freddiesayers) April 17, 2024

According to a written answer in the House of Commons, the Foreign Office Counter Disinformation and Media Development Programme has paid GDI £2.6m since 2019. Other funders for GDI include Open Society Foundations and the European Union.

Sayers believes GDI disproportionately gives low brand safety ratings to websites with a right-wing viewpoint and noted in his own report that GDI is more likely to give low ratings in the US to conservative-leaning websites.

He wrote: “At a time when the news media is so distrusted and faces a near-broken business model, the role of government should be to prevent, not encourage, and most certainly not fund, consolidations of monopoly power around certain ideological viewpoints.”

GDI meanwhile sees its role as countering the spread of low-quality content online, which proliferates because of an online ecosystem that targets advertising against readers, whatever website they land on, via programmatic systems.

Press Gazette understands that websites can appeal against their inclusion on GDI’s Dynamic Inclusion List and that sites can come off the list. But it does not appear that ratings are shared with publishers themselves, and the governance process around decisions made by GDI and appeals is also unclear.

GDI said in a statement: “GDI is a non-profit that brings transparency to digital advertising. We provide risk assessments of online news to the advertising industry, which uses this data to make more informed choices over the advertising they buy online. Fully informed transactions between buyers and sellers are a key tenet of a free market.”

Rival news website rating company Newsguard recently downgraded its score for The New York Times because it said anti-Trump bias was apparent in news stories.

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The new chief executive of fact-checking charity Full Fact says he wants to attract more funding by boosting its public profile.

Chris Morris, a long-time BBC correspondent, was announced as the successor to founding chief executive Will Moy on Thursday.

Morris has not run an organisation before but he told Press Gazette: “I have the experience of going on TV and gabbing.”

His role, as such, “is to be the public face” of Full Fact alongside a “great senior management team”, ensuring they “are prominent enough in what we know is a real battle out there to ensure that people have access to good information…

“Yes, we are branded as the UK’s only independent fact-checking charity, but we do quite a lot more than fact-checking.”

Between 2017 and 2021 Morris was the first on-screen correspondent for BBC Reality Check, the corporation’s fact-checking initiative which now sits within BBC Verify. Prior to that he spent most of his career as a foreign correspondent for the broadcaster.

Morris said his new role will, in a way, be “similar to working in the BBC. You need to know how to balance making a splash and remaining impartial. And actually it can be quite a difficult tightrope to walk sometimes, but that’s what we need to do.

“I think we need to generate a bit more bang for our buck. And if we can do that, then we get more people hopefully interested in funding us, we get more people interested in following our campaigns and we have more impact.”

In 2021 Full Fact drew approximately 35% of its revenue from Meta and Google. Editor Steve Nowottny told Press Gazette last year the organisation was aiming to diversify its funding streams.

Election leaflets that look like your local newspaper are ‘bullshit’

Morris praised his predecessor Moy for doing “an amazing job building [Full Fact] from nothing to what it is today.

“I think we now need to get it into a place where just more people know about it.

“We have 50,000 people who’ve signed up to our petition to get MPs to correct the record in a better way. Let’s make it 500,000.”

That petition is part of a campaign by Full Fact to “demand better from our MPs” – parliamentarians who are not ministers are not allowed to correct Hansard, something the fact-checking organisation wants to see changed. Full Fact has kept a lengthy list of the politicians it has found to have made uncorrected false statements since 2022, alongside the length of time since they requested a correction.

In January, that campaign saw Moy grilled by MPs on the DCMS subcommittee on online harms and disinformation, with Labour’s Clive Efford accusing Full Fact of “attacking” the political community and portraying them all as liars.

Morris backed the continuation of the campaign, saying: “I think everyone in that room was there because they care about honesty in politics. And if you can’t have a robust debate about that, then you’ve got a problem…

“We should be absolutely unyielding in our position that we expect the highest possible standards from our elected representatives. I don’t think it’s a bad place to start.”

He stressed that Full Fact isn’t “picking on you as an individual” when it requests a correction.

“If they were in their family Whatsapp group and said, ‘Oh I’ve heard this is happening’, and then it turns out that actually that the person they heard it from got it wrong, they’d probably feel duty-bound to go back into the family Whatsapp group and say: ‘Actually don’t worry, what I’d heard was wrong.’

“So if you do that for your family Whatsapp group, what’s wrong with doing it in public? I think being able to correct yourself in public is actually a sign of strength, not a sign of weakness… And if there are some of them who don’t like that scrutiny I think they might be in the wrong job, frankly.”

Morris said the upcoming general election will be a priority for Full Fact, noting it could be “the first generative AI election”.

However, he seemed more concerned with the skulduggery political parties already engage in during elections. For example, he wanted to make sure that “manifestos are scrutinised properly” and that there is “some sort of proper mechanism so you can’t just put whatever you want in a manifesto and not have it called out”.

His other focus is advertising around elections, asking “what are the political parties going to commit to do to make sure the way they advertise – particularly in an era when direct online advertising can be so targeted – that the information they’re putting out is good information?

“And I’d extend that to election material in general. No more election leaflets that look like your local newspaper. No more graphs that completely miss out on the data you don’t like and have the data you do. I mean, it’s bullshit.”

[Read more: Conservative Party apologises for sending ‘Chronicle’ fake local papers on Chronicle Week’s turf]

‘It is amazing how stuff will spread if it isn’t stopped’

Not all Full Fact’s work focuses on politicians: recent fact checks have asserted that “‘Human meat’ is not being sold in the UK” and that a “Video showing genetically modified tomato ‘swimming’ is fake”. One last week corrected an erroneous Daily Star report that had said the number of people dying from obesity each year was 2.8 “billion” rather than “million”.

Asked whether such claims may be too silly to be worth fact checking, Morris said: “We shouldn’t underestimate how information spreads.”

Citing the fact checks Full Fact is paid to provide to Facebook, he said that “some of them are things which you might think: ‘Well, that’s obviously not true.’

“But if it’s spreading anyway via Facebook groups and by Whatsapp group… I think it’s important not to think: ‘Oh that’s too obvious to fact check’… It is amazing how stuff will spread if it isn’t stopped.”

He also argued that it this is “even more important in the world of generative AI” which can produce false information from sources like Hansard if there are inaccuracies allowed to remain there.

But he added: “You don’t want to get too po-faced about it.

“I mean, everyone talks about, you know – ‘fact checkers are all nerds’. Maybe we need to be a bit more rock and roll at times. But I think the point is that we should not underestimate how what we might think of as [an] obvious thing can spread as bad information.”

‘Are there people that don’t like it in some media circles? Yeah, of course there are’

Fact-checkers have come in for scrutiny from outside Westminster, too. Earlier this year Trump-aligned congressman Matt Gaetz called for an official investigation into media watchdog Newsguard after journalist Matt Taibbi told a House of Representatives subcommittee that it and companies like it were “making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations or sympathies are deemed ‘misinformation’, ‘disinformation’ or ‘malinformation’”.

A search for BBC Verify on X (formerly Twitter), meanwhile, turns up reams of tweets mocking the corporation’s transparency efforts or criticising them as Orwellian.

But Morris said “the idea that [fact-checking] doesn’t work or it’s some sort of stitch-up – I just don’t buy that, really. We shouldn’t feel defensive about saying we’re trying to stand up for good information.

“Are there people that don’t like it in some media circles? Yeah, of course there are. I’m happy to debate them about it, frankly.

“But the idea [we’re] trying to close down debate I find quite annoying, because it’s actually quite the opposite. We’re trying to encourage good debate.”

‘Chris Morris is once again in charge of facts’

Perhaps ironically given his new role, Morris shares his name with an actor arguably most famous as a fake news anchorman in Brass Eye.

“I don’t like it, but I have to go along with it,” fact-checker Morris said. “Chris Morris is once again in charge of facts.”

Morris recalled that for his first foreign correspondent posting he spent two years in Sri Lanka during “pretty intense times – two civil wars going on, didn’t really know what I was doing, green as the grass.

“And I came back for the first time, I walked into the BBC office, and this guy came and someone introduces me, says: ‘This is Chris Morris.’

He says: ‘I’m a massive fan, brilliant work!’

“Thought I’d really made an impact. Little did I know that while I’d been away this new series had begun with someone with the same name…

“I was thrilled for at least 30 seconds that my ground-breaking work had had such global impact.”

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It took approximately ten minutes for generative AI to receive its first mention at the European Broadcasting Union’s NewsXchange conference in Dublin this week, and as at most journalism events in 2023, what the technology may or may not do to the news industry remained the leading topic of discussion for the whole two days.

Copyright infringement, the risk of misinformation, how AI tools might change the economics of the industry and what plans news organisations have right now were among the main AI themes of the broadcast-focused conference. Experts from the likes of Reuters, ITN, Storyful and ABC News chipped in.

[Also from News Xchange 2023: Liz Truss calls Daily Star’s Lizzy Lettuce stunt ‘puerile’ and unfunny and Laura Kuenssberg says it is not the job of broadcasters to sway public opinion]

Should AI companies be paying news organisations for use of their content?

Three separate panels discussed the possibility of AI businesses being made to pay news organisations for the content on which they have trained their large language models.

In a session focused specifically on the impacts generative AI might have on the news industry, Storyful founder Mark Little said: “I think we all have PTSD from the early part of the web – ‘information wants to be free’ and we were all going to let the information flow, there were no paywalls – and I think we got burned by that. 

“So this time around I’m very impressed by – inspired by – the speed at which we have seen large news publishers challenge the ability, first of all, for these models to be trained without any kind of scrutiny or oversight from existing content… and secondly, then opening up a collective bargaining [process] with these tech startups to say: ‘If you want access to this, you pay for licensing.’”

Little added, however, that rather than ad hoc collective bargaining, he would prefer systems be put in place for news publishers to be paid continuously for the use of their content.

[Read more: Journalists, ChatGPT is coming for your jobs (but not in the way you might think)]

The Financial Times reported last week that executives from companies including ChatGPT creator OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Adobe had been meeting with counterparts from publishers including News Corp, Axel Springer, Guardian Media Group and The New York Times to discuss copyright issues around AI training.

Press Gazette has previously reported the warnings of executives at the FT, Guardian and Le Monde about the need for news organisations to “get control of their IP” soon.

In a keynote interview at NewsXchange, Reuters president Paul Bascobert said he thought “all content creators are in some form of discussion” with AI companies about licensing their content – but stopped short of confirming if his company was striking any deals.

“I wouldn’t say doing deals – I think ‘in discussions’ was the term used, and I think we’re all trying to work with those companies, and there’s many of them out there today.

“There are certainly some cases out there in courts right now that we’re watching closely, some we’re involved in, to make sure that our content can’t be taken without our permission. And so there is a legal pathway there. But there’s also a negotiation approach that says maybe there’s a way we can work together in a productive way.”

And in an interview about challenges faced by commercial news broadcasters, ITN chief executive Rachel Corp said: “I know there’s some talk at the moment… on trying to get big tech to pay for the use of our data to help train and educate different AI tools.

“I think that’s only one part of it. But I think if big tech said ‘We can’t solve this, come in!’ – that’s quite good, isn’t it?”

[Read more: News execs fear ‘end of our business model’ from AI unless publishers ‘get control’ of their IP]

How big is the risk of misinformation from generative AI?

Emmanuelle Saliba, a senior reporter with the American broadcaster ABC News, said that ahead of the US general election in November 2024 her organisation expects to see “a lot of synthetic media” entering the information ecosystem.

“We’re starting to see that trickle in, sort of in a playful way, which I think is a great opportunity for us to cover it and to start educating and helping our audiences understand that these tools exist, that they can be used to create these fake images of Trump getting arrested.”

Saliba said AI-generated images like that of the Pope in a large white puffer jacket were “entertaining and pretty easy to spot– but our worry is what happens on the local level, where there’s less attention, fewer cameras, where voice is more difficult to detect”.

She added that ABC News was wary that political candidates or public figures might take advantage of the existence of synthetic content to cast aspersions on real footage or images that might be inconvenient to them.

“I think also it’s a very trendy thing to use AI, and so I think we’re going to see candidates… using it as a way to get attention and to be covered. And so we have to think really strategically – is [any given AI-generated piece of content] worth our audience knowing about?”

Storyful’s Little, who also founded Kinzen, a start-up that aims to curb the spread of harmful content, advised news publishers: “If you’re using comment sections, if you’re using user-generated content in any way, [if your] commissioning editors are going out there looking for people to send in submissions – make sure you can detect in all of that the synthetic media, the people who try to pitch you a scam…

“And make sure that you are transparent about the ways in which you treat synthetic media coming in and the way that you might create synthetic media yourself.”

The editor of the Irish Times apologised last month after the publication unknowingly published a comment piece that had been created with generative AI.

Little cited the recently-launched on-air verification project BBC Verify as a promising approach to dealing with shifts in the trustworthiness of content, as well as Project Origin, a collaborative project hoping to make it so the provenance of any given piece of content is easily checkable.

Reuters president Bascobert was relatively upbeat about the effect of AI on the information ecosystem, however: “For anybody who wants, there are 40 hours of misinformation every 24 hours to consume. So, you know, if we go from 40 to 70… There’s [already] more than people need today if they want to swim in a place that feels good but may not be true.”

Bascobert said he was more worried about a risk to cybersecurity from “generative AI’s capability to generate its own code”. The vulnerability of news organisations to cyberattack made headlines in December when The Guardian’s systems were compromised so badly staff were barred from the offices for months. 

[Read more: BBC unveils Verify team of 60 journalists it says will be ‘transparency in action’]

The effect of AI on journalists’ jobs

Panellists across the two days at NewsXchange were broadly optimistic that AI would not displace the need for journalists – although that did not necessarily mean they thought no one would lose their job. 

Storyful’s Little said: “I think there’s a possibility that, actually, generative AI will produce – not a new set of jobs necessarily – but a rebalancing, potentially very positively, so that we can actually do what we should be doing.”

Citing the closure of Buzzfeed News and Vice’s bankruptcy, Kirsten Dewar, of real-time data analysis company Dataminr, said she thought “there are far greater threats in the shorter term to journalism jobs” than AI.

“There are a lot of things that are happening in the news industry that scream more ‘diversify your revenue streams’ and ‘run a better, stronger business’ than ‘AI is coming for the jobs’.

“In our case we’ve actually seen the opposite effect, with newsrooms that use tools like ours actually needing more journalists to come in and do the fact-checking and the curation.”

And Ariane Bernard, a former chief digital officer of Le Parisien who now works as a data and analytics product consultant, added: “We have to be mindful that our businesses survive as businesses so that we can still have journalists.

“The thirst for knowledge is fairly stable! The fact that we might even have more ‘sludge’, to use Mark [Little]’s word [for low-quality information on which AIs might be trained], might actually increase the need.

“But fundamentally, as the population rises, as the world is more complex and more intertwined, and therefore in a way that the interest of the news to the public is actually wider than it used to be because we’re supposed to know of the world – there should actually be more of a need for journalists. But they probably won’t do the same thing.”

However, hours after this discussion the news broke that Axel Springer-owned German tabloid Bild would cut hundreds of roles and replace some editors with AI.

How AI might change the journalism business model

Beyond jobs, the executives and experts who spoke about generative AI at NewsXchange advised publishers there were commercial opportunities they were well placed to seize.

Storyful’s Little said “the end of the world is not coming” and “the really dangerous stuff that’s happening we know about: it’s accelerating a flood of misinformation into our ecosystem.

“I think it’s obviously diminishing the value when you create a piece of content because it’s now commoditised – that’s a huge challenge for the news business.”

But he said he thought there were some “very clear things” that AI can help the news business with.

“Think about the assets that the news business has right now that the AI generators don’t. They’ve got tons of venture capital – but they have no data. They’ve run out of data. They’re using really crappy data and they’re looking for more data.

“Big cheques are being written on the capacity of these big companies, these startups, to find data. You have data, you have content, so you’re not powerless – that’s the one thing I want to articulate.”

Bascobert made a similar suggestion later in the conference: “The threat of generative AI to create a lot more misinformation, I think, will in some ways help strong brands to rise. I think brands will become more important as a signalling device for what is true – what is provably factual or [possible] to document.”

And Bernard emphasised that beyond business disruption, generative AI could offer newsrooms the opportunity to reach new audiences.

“I think you want to cautiously advance with an open heart,” she said. “Because it’s not like the way we run our news organisations is the most accomplished that we could ever do. There’s plenty we don’t cover, there are plenty of audiences we’ve either never addressed or have abandoned over time. And they know this. 

“So even if we can’t solve all these problems all at once, all new technologies give us a chance to fix some of the wrongs or address things that are not addressed.

“And in this way, the optimism is to say we’re going to gain ground either where we lost it or we never had it, and we’re going to do it in a way that is rational in this news organisation – because we don’t necessarily want to abandon other things we’ve been doing.”

What are those newsrooms doing with generative AI now?

Both Bascobert at Reuters and ITN’s Corp said their organisations are making moves to experiment with generative AI.

Corp said ITN “put out guidelines to our staff in the last week really talking to them about – let’s start experimenting off-air or non-live with the things that we can do while protecting fact-checking and eyewitness journalism”.

And Bascobert said: “We’re part of Thomson Reuters, which is a technology company. And so for us, technology is really more core to who we are as a business, and for us to commit [to] long-term capital projects that involve technology and AI is a very natural thing for our board of directors…

“That doesn’t mean that we don’t need to move quickly and be agile. We do want to spend more time with our clients, and understand what the problems are as they are making their migration.

“But you have, and will continue to see, us investing long term in building tools for discovery, for manipulation, for editing, to get into the workflows as well as commercials – the selling of content. We’re going to continue to evolve our tech platform.”

[Read more: ChatGPT six months on – Insight from 12 news leaders on generative AI and journalism]

The post What will generative AI do to journalism? Experts and execs sound off at NewsXchange appeared first on Press Gazette.

Almost two-thirds of people say they do not believe everything they read in the news, according to a survey of UK attitudes and preferences concerning the media and trust.

The survey of 2,000 UK adults by news technology company Tickaroo and research agency Opinium found that 60% of respondents were sceptical about some of the stories they read, while 66% were concerned about fake news.

Among those that said they did not trust the news, the most common reason given was that journalists create spin (43%) followed by misreporting (42%).

Trust in news: Almost four in ten do not trust news very much

Almost four in ten people (37%) said they did not trust the news very much, while 6% said they did not trust it all.

Just over half (55%) said they trusted the news a fair amount. Previous surveys have found low levels of trust in news in the UK, with one survey of 24 countries by King's College, London finding that 13% of people in the UK trusted the press with only Egypt ranking lower.

Lack of positive news stories

The research also sought to uncover what kinds of stories audiences wanted and how the news made them feel. Over half (51%) said news brands only report on problems and issues, with the same percentage also saying news outlets do not report on solutions.

Asked how the news made them feel, almost half (47%) of people said watching or reading the news made them feel negative with older people aged 55 and above most likely to say this (52%) and young people aged 18 to 34 least likely (36%).

Women were less likely to feel positive after consuming news compared to men (15% vs 23% respectively).

Other research such as the Reuters Institute 2022 Digital News Report has found a perception that the news agenda is too depressing is among the factors leading to news avoidance.

News sites are preferred source of breaking news

Amid concerns that young people are turning away from traditional news providers, the research found that more young people (45%) turn to social media first to find out about big breaking news events, compared to 32% who turn to UK-based news sites such as the BBC.

Among the whole population, however, news sites were the most popular source for breaking news (45%) followed by TV (24%).

Two third of respondents (67%) said it was important to them to receive breaking news updates.

When it comes to how audiences access news, 39% said they access the news via their mobile phones, with 24% saying they used their televisions.

The research also sought to understand audience preferences around article format and length, finding that 21% of readers spent less than two minutes reading a news article, while the average ideal length of a news article had decreased from 368 words to 346 words in the past year. The researchers noted that this pointed towards decreasing attention spans. Just 12% of people said that they read for more than ten minutes on average.

Younger people most often preferred short live news updates (26%) as their news format of choice, while older audiences aged over 55 preferred TV news bulletins (47%).

Among all age groups, most respondents preferred news on politics (54%), followed by sports (33%) and technology (26%).

Among young people, politics was also the most popular type of news, although this was less favoured than among the whole population at 35% and technology (31%).

The survey, which was weighted to be nationally representative, also found that most subscribers to news outlets (45%) are aged 18 to 34 years old. This contradicts research from Yougov and the Reuters Institute which has found that those that pay for news are typically older.

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BBC News has unveiled BBC Verify, a brand aiming to build audience trust by showing how its journalists know what they are reporting is true.

The BBC says Verify will be “a team of investigative journalists, a brand and also a physical area in the BBC newsroom in London”.

BBC News chief executive Deborah Turness first revealed plans for the new team at the Sir Harry Summit in London last week when she said BBC Verify would be a “new brand within our brand” that would “pull back the curtain” on BBC journalists’ work to produce “radical transparency”.

What is BBC Verify?

Announcing BBC Verify on Wednesday, the corporation said it will “showcase the advanced editorial tools and techniques BBC News journalists are using to investigate, source and verify information, video, and images”.

The “highly specialised team” will “share the evidence of their work with their audiences”, using capabilities that “go beyond conventional newsroom techniques”.

The BBC Verify team will consist of “around 60 journalists” and pull together the following existing teams which already carry out open-source investigative (OSINT), fact-checking and verification work:

• The User Generated Content (UGC) team
• World Service Disinformation Team
• Monitoring Disinformation Team
• Reality Check
• Data and Analysis, including analysis editor Ros Atkins and disinformation correspondent Marianna Spring.

BBC Monitoring assistant editor Olga Robinson tweeted: “My team will be part of BBC Verify – a new team of investigative journalists with years of experience in verification work and forensic journalism. Covering disinformation will still be an important part of our daily work too.”

The BBC said Verify journalists “will regularly appear across BBC News content, including on the BBC News website live pages, radio and the BBC News channel.

“The team will work across a range of stories, from breaking news to analysis and visual journalism all the way to original investigations.”

The BBC tends to rank highly for trust among news audiences, but has nonetheless suffered falls in recent years in common with other news organisations.

Turness told the Sir Harry Summit: “I see our currency as trust – and in a world of fake news and disinformation where consumers tell us they find it harder and harder to trust even brands like BBC when we tell them what we know, we’ve got to shift that and where we’ve got to invest is to invest in bringing investigative journalism into everyday news.”

She said BBC News already carries out a lot of open source journalism and verification but “the audience doesn’t actually know it because they don’t see it”.

BBC Verify will, she said, “pull back the curtain and even in our core content on our core, traditional broadcast platforms as well as digital live pages we’re going to be talking about and showing more and more of that journalism to build that trust”.

When will BBC Verify launch?

The corporation said BBC Verify branding and journalists would begin to appear in output in coming weeks.

Turness said in a statement: “News consumers have told us that the more they know about the work our journalists do, the more they will know they can trust our journalism. BBC Verify is transparency in action – fact-checking, verifying video, countering disinformation, analysing data and explaining complex stories in the pursuit of truth.

“This is our promise to consumers – we understand that their trust must be earned and we will show them how we are doing that each and every day.”

Lindsay McCoy, currently deputy editor of the One, Six and Ten o’clock News will be BBC Verify’s executive editor, commencing in the role “in the coming weeks”.

BBC director of news content Richard Burgess said McCoy was “a widely respected, strong editorial leader and has played a big part in the success of the One, Six and 10 o’clock News”.

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US congressman Matt Gaetz has called for a House of Representatives subcommittee to investigate media watchdog Newsguard.

Gaetz, a Trump-aligned Republican, made the comments after a hearing about the so-called “Twitter Files”, alleging that Newsguard drives ad revenue away from certain outlets and toward others deemed more favourable.

Newsguard assigns scores to news sites based on their credibility and transparency. It has previously made headlines for giving failing grades to outlets including the Daily Mail, Fox News, The Daily Beast and MSNBC – although all but MSNBC now score at least 60 out of 100 points. (Note: the author of this article previously worked as an analyst for Newsguard.)

Thursday’s hearing before the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government centred on allegations Twitter censored certain users at the suggestion of US government bodies.

Matt Taibbi, the former Rolling Stone journalist who now publishes on newsletter platform Substack, told the subcommittee that in the course of reporting the Twitter Files story: “We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation requests from every corner of government, from the FBI, the DHS, the HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA.

“For every government agency scanning Twitter there were perhaps 20 private entities doing the same thing, including Stanford’s election integrity partnership, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and many others, many taxpayer-funded.”

The Twitter Files are internal documents from the platform which were published by new owner Elon Musk shortly after he bought the company. They focus on how Twitter came to ban Donald Trump from Twitter, how the organisation handled the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story and the mechanisms it had for making certain accounts less visible.

Newsguard predominantly generates revenue by licensing its reports and data for brand safety purposes – for example, the creation of lists of sites on which companies can advertise without needing to worry about appearing alongside inaccurate content.

The company is not explicitly taxpayer-funded, but does have US government bodies among its customers. Its co-chief executive, Gordon Crovitz, told Press Gazette Twitter has not been one of its customers, however.

Taibbi charged that “a focus of this fast-growing network… is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations or sympathies are deemed ‘misinformation’, ‘disinformation’ or ‘malinformation’…

“Ordinary Americans are not just being reported to Twitter for de-amplification or de-platforming, but to firms like Paypal, digital advertisers like Xandr, and digital crowdfunding sites like Gofundme.

“These companies can and do refuse service to law-abiding people and businesses whose only crime is falling afoul of a distant, faceless, unaccountable algorithmic judge.”

Another Twitter Files author testifying at the hearing, Michael Shellenberger, termed this alleged dynamic as the “censorship-industrial complex”.

Representative Gaetz, who sits on the weaponisation subcommittee, commented: “What I’m used to in this town is government officials pick their favourite outlets and they give them the best scoops and they give them the best stories, and there’s a fusion of media and government that has long made me uncomfortable.

“But what you’re describing now is literally the directing of revenue to certain media companies over other media companies, designed and implemented with US government funding and support.”

He subsequently tweeted: “Newsguard is a US government-backed entity that literally drives ad revenue away from media companies to other media companies that are considered more ‘favourable.’ The Weaponization Subcommittee must investigate Newsguard!”

Press Gazette has previously reported on how Newsguard’s partnerships with ad networks meant news websites could take a revenue hit if they fell afoul of the company’s ratings process.

[Read more: News websites rated ‘red’ by Newsguard could miss out on ad money after agency deal]

Asked for comment, Crovitz forwarded Press Gazette an email he sent Taibbi following his appearance before Congress.

Crovitz wrote in the message: “As is public, our work for the Pentagon’s Cyber Command is focused on the identification and analysis of information operations targeting the US and its allies conducted by hostile governments, including Russia and China.

“Our analysts alert officials in the US and in other democracies, including Ukraine, about new false narratives targeting America and its allies, and we provide an understanding of how this disinformation spreads online. We are proud of our work countering Russian and Chinese disinformation on behalf of Western democracies.”

Crovitz went on to say Newsguard has assigned critical ratings to sites from across the political spectrum and insisted the organisation carries out its work transparently: “Silicon Valley algorithms don’t call for comment. We always do.

“Rather than government censorship of content online, we believe readers should have the information they need about sources of news they see online so that they can make up their own minds about which sources they choose to trust.”

Crovitz told Press Gazette Taibbi was yet to respond to the email.

Gaetz and Taibbi are not the first to criticise Newsguard on free speech grounds. Last year Newsguard revised Fox News’ score down from a narrow overall pass to a narrow fail, prompting the cable news channel to blast the fact-checker as “a for-profit organisation operating under the guise of an objective public service”.

Conservative video outlet Prager U has similarly blasted Newsguard as “the political elite’s tool for censorship”. And when Mail Online was, for a period, given a failing grade by the company it described the assessment as “egregiously erroneous”. (That grade was subsequently revised up.)

The company has now dropped its pass/fail system, instead listing each site’s score, but its customers can still customise their advertising whitelists to include or exclude sites depending on their Newsguard score.

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Fact-checkers need to “learn from the disinformation merchants” in how they present their debunks, the BBC‘s disinformation editor has told Parliament.

Rebecca Skippage was among four fact-checking and science communications experts appearing before the DCMS subcommittee on online harms and disinformation on Tuesday.

They told MPs that essay-length debunks are likely not reaching the people they need to, and they warned that big tech’s appetite for fact-checks may create a market for “low-quality, high-volume” commercial fact-checking.

Skippage warned: “According to the latest Ofcom survey, a third of people who are online don’t recognise that there is any potential misinformation out there.”

Asked how disinformation on social media might be curbed, Skippage suggested a combination of media literacy training, particularly for children, and for the media to be where people encounter misinformation.

“Very often, the people who are most affected by disinformation are not necessarily the people who seek out the answers, who come to the BBC website, who go to Full Fact and ask the question ‘What is right and what is wrong?’ So we need to be in those spaces. We need to be on Tiktok, on Telegram, on Instagram giving good information.

“And one of the things that I’ve said before is that we need to learn from the disinformation merchants, because they are extremely good at getting people’s attention. They are really, really good communicators. And so we need to be using the same sorts of techniques.”

[Read more: Why Tiktok is one of the ‘main priorities’ at BBC News for 2023]

Skippage said this type of disinformation content is “very human-centred. It’s people who are directly affected by certain situations. They use fantastic graphics. It’s very simple, it’s very eye-catching. So [when] you’re scrolling through, that’s what you go to.

“And with the best will in the world, a 2000-word article on a publisher’s website, which can contravene something that you’re really going to be drawn to, is not a brilliant corrective.”

During a discussion of what constitutes high-quality fact-checking, Full Fact chief executive Will Moy drew a contrast between the fact-checkers represented on the panel (BBC News, Channel 4 News and Full Fact) and “untrustworthy so-called fact-checking [which] will often be political parties just making an argument.

“But what we’re also seeing… are commercial organisations that are providing fact-checking services largely for the internet companies.

“And they are in a very difficult market because you have a few powerful buyers and many essentially treated as interchangeable suppliers. And the only way that is going to go is lower quality, lower price.

“So we are concerned that actually there will be an emerging breed of fact-checking online, which is high-volume, low-quality, and actually breaks down the reputation of fact-checking.

“That’s one of the reasons why Full Fact has supported the emergence of something called the European fact-checking standards network, which is a new code practice across Council of Europe countries trying to agree high quality standards for fact-checking, including methodology and transparency.”

Moy did not identify any commercial fact-checkers of concern.

Asked to comment, Gordon Crovitz, the co-chief executive of for-profit news rating company Newsguard (for which the author of this article, Bron Maher, used to work), told Press Gazette Moy was “right that the platforms – at least until recently, as part of their general refusal to take responsibility for what’s on their platforms – were not willing to spend very much on fact-checkers or any other positive enhancements to their products… But I would say we’ve recently seen a change in attitude from some of the platforms.

“But I would say they’re not looking so much for commoditised fact-checks. What they’re really looking for is detailed analysis of false narratives, explanations of the debunkings based on authoritative sources, and the ability to have this work be read both by humans and machines.”

Similarly, the Baybars Örsek, vice president of fact-checking at AI-driven commercial fact-checker Logically said: “According to the latest ‘state of the fact-checkers report’ published by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) in 2021, 44.2% of the fact-checkers committed to IFCN’s standards are commercial/for-profit organisations. Just last year, Maria Ressa, chief executive of the Filipino for-profit media outlet Rappler, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. 

“All certified fact-checking organisations commit to the highest standards on transparency and accountability to fight against mis-and-disinformation. Commercial and non-profit organisations alike play a vital role in this global effort to tackle the growing threat of mis- and dis-information.”

Despite their fact-checking concerns the panel spoke positively of the way media coverage of certain science issues, in particular the Covid-19 pandemic, had been handled in recent years.

Fiona Fox, the chief executive of the Science Media Centre which connects media with scientific experts relevant to their stories, praised journalists across the media for their work: “Something is going right here. Fact-checkers are part of the media, but also let’s give credit to the science, health and environment journalists who work for The Sun and the Mirror and the Daily Mail and Sky News and 5 Live and the mass media – which absolutely, our surveys show, is where the public still go to for a lot of their information – those science journalists are very trustworthy.

“They’re good journalists, they try to get it right, and they are conveying a lot of information from these trusted sources.”

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A new report has found Gen Z are much more likely than older consumers to fact-check their information – but are nonetheless more susceptible to Covid-19 conspiracy theories.

The report, produced by social-first publisher The News Movement and consultancy Oliver Wyman, urges news publishers to invest in personalisation and creating more entertaining, informative content.

The report is the culmination of a two-year research project into what businesses should know about consumers aged between 18 and 25.

The research reaffirms the already widely understood notion that young consumers get much of their news from social media. But it also makes clear the extent to which they do not trust that information.

The report said: “For news Gen Zers are 2.7 times more likely to tap social media than broadcast news, and while they might trust traditional news sources, less than a third use digital or print newspapers and magazines for information in the first place.”

While 57% of Gen Z respondents to the research said they use social media as one of their most common sources of information, they also ranked it as their least trusted source. Radio was the most trusted, followed by print news, podcasts, the internet in general and YouTube.

However, the report said: “60% of Gen Zers worry that short articles or videos… do not provide the full story. And over 50% feel more susceptible to misinformation on social media than on traditional news sources.”

Because they favour personalised content, 50% of the research’s Gen Z respondents said they were worried their social media content might be too biased. Less than half said they felt informed about the news, “compared with nearly 70% of other generations”.

Being conscious of this, respondents reported doing their own fact-checking: the report found that Gen Z is “nearly twice as likely as older generations to fact-check their news, and nearly 60% say they’ve developed techniques to spot unreliable or fake news”.

However, this appears to clash with another of the report’s findings: “Gen Zers who say they fact-check their news were 2.5 times more likely than other generations to generally agree with the idea that Covid-19 was a hoax promoted by the government.” Some 77% of Gen Z respondents who said they fact-check their news reported believing “at least one Covid-19 related conspiracy theory”.

The report’s authors speculated that what the respondents described as "fact-checking" may be more of a sniff test than actual verification: “While [Gen Z] might use traditional sources to verify the information from bigger news sources, they are often relying on ‘social proof’ methods to quickly distinguish faulty information on social media.

“By using comments, discussion, tone of voice and popularity as indicators of whether they are looking at the ‘truth’, Gen Zers are often allowing intuition to drive fact-checking.”

The authors encouraged news providers to incorporate links into their social-first content to make it as easy as possible to check information, citing Snap’s dynamic stories feature as a successful example of established news outlets catering to young audiences.

How news publishers can reach Gen Z

The report had some key takeaways for news businesses hoping to reach Gen Z.

To get in front of younger consumers, the authors said “businesses must engage with this demographic on its preferred platforms, using content that is both informative and entertaining”.

For news in particular, they said: “Gen Zers like the convenience, immediate access and diverse viewpoints available on social media.”

Gen Z respondents said it was twice as important to them that their media content was created specifically for their age cohort than it was that it had an honest tone or style.

The authors recommended: “To reach this generation, news organisations and companies should create visually and sonically pleasing content dripping with (authentic) personality.”

Similarly, companies should hire “niche creators who are highly educated in their topic and arm them with quality information that can be shared in digestible fashion”.

[Read more: How do you sell news to Gen Z? Write about social justice, don’t insult them and stop saying ‘newspaper’]

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